rec.autos.simulators

Indeed!  The ovals make a nice addition to GPL, and provide a great learning
opportunity, as you can focus on the car's behavior and how setup changes
affect it more easily when you're not dealing with learning a complex track as
well.  The possibility exists for great online racing also, with close
competion from start to finish.

Yes they do.  Besides the obvious problems with the walls, they seem to have
difficulty in traffic.  I ran a pro short race at Loudon the other day, and
couldn't qualify better than 5th, about a second off Clark's pole time.  For
the first part of the race, all was well; the AI were fast and the racing was
close.  But once we hit traffic, they lost their speed advantage and I ended up
lapping the entire field.  That would never happen at any of the standard
tracks!  But I expect a bit of tweaking on the LP files for Loudon will solve
that, so maybe it'll get ironed out soon.

Thanks to Dave Noonan  for his efforts, and the guys at
http://www.racesimcentral.net/ for sharing 'em with us.

Steve B.

remove "edy" from address for email

Cheers!

??Jan Kohl??        **The Pits Performance Team**
Computer Systems Programmer
USAF Air-Ground Operations School
Hurlburt Field, FL

Castle Graphics - http://www.castlegraphics.com/
The Pits - http://www.theuspits.com/

Jesse

|Arto, I'm guessing that it's because we're trying to manipulate Indycar and
|NASCAR .lp files with GPL.  Probably what's happening is that since the
|brakes on 30 year old cars are not what they are now, that the AI find it
|impossible to stop in the same space that modern Indycars and NASCAR cars
|can.  If this is true, we'll have to look at making some new AI files for
|these tracks to make the pitting work a little better...
|
|Cheers!
|

|
|??Jan Kohl??        **The Pits Performance Team**
|Computer Systems Programmer
|USAF Air-Ground Operations School
|Hurlburt Field, FL
|
|Castle Graphics - http://www.castlegraphics.com/
|The Pits - http://www.theuspits.com/
|
|>But the AI drivers seem to have some serious problems in these ovals:
|>sometimes they seem to drive along the concrete, all tyres pointing
|>to the wall. In that they do not drive very fast, though... :)
|>But the most difficult to the poor AI's seems to drive to the pits
|>after the cooling lap: many of them seem to find out too late that it
|>is time to stop; they make a very quick turn to their pit places and
|>crash to the pit wall. In the race where I was 3rd, at least 3 or 4
|>drivers crashed there so badly that their cars got fire. And poor Jacky
|>Ickx crashed so badly to his pit wall that his car made pirouettes in
|>the air, the height was at least 20 to 30 meters!  ;-/
|>I saved this final episode - "coming home" - with all these strange
|>incidents. If somebody is interested, I can send it in mail...
|
|
|